I know why they do it. I sympathize. It’s short; it’s clearly written; it’s divided into ten tightly structured chapters; it has enough sex to titillate but is nonetheless G-rated by today’s debased standards; the author’s life provides a nanny-approved cautionary tale re Mr. Booze; once in a while it might engender the occasional worthwhile discussion.
But it’s a nasty icky thing to do. Slender, chic, trim, toned, elegant, articulate, ominous: The Great Gatsby is woefully inappropriate fodder for undeveloped tastes. Only the woo-woo-iest and touchy-feely do-gooder would expect the average oh, whatever teenager to consider a first-class Bordeaux as other than an opportunity to get sloshed. That isn’t to say that a teen might come to acquire the requisite discernment, but that takes time and practice and development and maturity. The chances of your basic American 15-year-old possessing such refined taste are slender to nil. While Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece undoubtedly tempts the hell out those charged with planning high school English curricula (vide the criteria outlined above) this is pearls before swine indeed.
Even should one out of a thousand adolescents show faint stirrings of a rise to the high barre of The Great Gatsby, the multiple hammers of Required Reading and Assigned Book Report and Five Paragraph Essay and Discuss Fitzgerald’s Use of Water Imagery are sure to pulverize those tender nascent outgrowths of perception. Classroom musk overwhelms Gatsby’s chilled juniper scent, with only the staleness of a dutiful B-minus lingering after. As I said, it’s a nasty icky thing to do.
Over the past several days I have read and re-read Gatsby, a good 40-plus years after my first attempt as a regimented high schooler in Denver. I can’t remember my five-paragraph essay topic; whatever it was, undoubtedly I finessed it with cobbled-together nonsense that I took about as seriously as I took the Great Pumpkin. I was adept at telling my teachers what they wanted to hear. Most kids are. That I have remembered not a word, not an image, not a character, from the novel offers compelling testimony to my state of mind concerning required reading projects and English Lit classes. It was my junior year, and by that time reading yet another novel for yet another English class had dropped near the bottom of my priorities list. I wasn’t in any condition to deal with the hothouse perfection of The Great Gatsby. I’m guessing here, but I’ll bet I skimmed it with unseemly haste and wound up with only vague impressions of people driving around in cars and talking at parties.
But I haven’t been skimming it now. I’ve been munching and tasting and sipping and pigging. I keep stopping to read passages out loud, to go back over and over particularly memorable moments or instances of luminous writing. Images and fragrances and mood and language coalesce together sometimes with such force as to suggest a subatomic attraction. Narrator Nick Carraway reflects back on the sweltering Long Island he has abandoned:
I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky and a lustreless moon. In the foreground four solemn men in dress suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely the men turn in at a house—the wrong house. But no one knows the woman’s name, and no one cares.
At this point I could come over all schoolmarm and have myself a regular old toot about the white trope throughout Gatsby, so beautifully counterpointed by Jay Gatsby’s exotic pink suit. Or the sowing of negative words—grotesque, crouching, sullen, overhanging, lustreless—that ensures that we’re ready for sparkles cold with jewels. Or that summary no one cares, an extended cadence on Jay Gatsby’s epitaph “The poor son-of-a-bitch” spoken by the only non-official attendee at the gravesite, the man with owl-eyed glasses whose only prior contribution had been that the books in Gatsby’s library were real rather than cardboard-box placebos.
No schoolmarm. No essay on themes in Gatsby, motives in Gatsby, tropes in Gatsby, the influence of Gatsby on American literature. No laments about Fitzgerald’s slide into alcoholic mediocrity, no wailings about lost successors to Tender Is the Night and Gatsby, no prurient digging into the possibility of Jordan Baker’s being a closet lesbian (or Nick Carraway in his own closet for that matter), no scandalized tut-tutting about Tom Buchanan’s racist bigotry. No smart-ass posturing that perhaps it isn’t really all that good, no matter what the Modern Library says.
Nope. Just a sigh of contentment and another sip of its frosted booziness.
“They’re a rotten crowd,” I shouted across the lawns. “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.” I’ve always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end.
Jimmy Gatz, floating lifeless in his swimming pool, just another dead thing in the late-summer heat. But he tried, dammit.